Bob the Angry Flower: Dog Killer

Stephen Notley

If The Boondocks, Zippy the Pinhead, and The Simpsons had an insane Canadian love child (who built killer robots), the result would be Bob the Angry Flower. Unpredictable, original, and wholly outrageous, Bob is coming to America—and not a moment too soon.

Bob the Angry Flower: Dog Killer

by Stephen Notley

ISBN: 9781892391346

Published: 2006

Available Format(s): Trade Paperback

Combining the politics of The Boondocks, the surrealism of Zippy the Pinhead, and the pop-culture madness of The Simpsons, Bob the Angry Flower is an edgy, trenchantly political, and achingly funny comic strip. Whether he’s building killer robots, running for pope, or just getting creamed at 20 Questions, Bob is locked, loaded, and ready to destroy the Earth—unless there’s something good on TV. Bob the Angry Flower: Dog Killer is exactly what disaffected teenagers, jaded grownups, disgruntled geeks, and Peter Pans of all ages have been waiting for: a flower with a brilliant mind, a bipolar temperament, and the attention span of a five-year-old loaded up on sugar and Saturday-morning cartoons.

This first U.S.-published collection of Canadian cartoonist Stephen Notley’s syndicated masterpiece is a crazed love letter to monster movies, petty demagogues, and vegetarian tyrants alike. Unpredictable, original, and wholly outrageous, Bob is coming to America—and not a moment too soon.

“Notley’s syndicated Bob the Angry Flower exemplifies the new science-fiction comics. Instead of rocketing around the galaxies, it generally stays on terra firma and lets the aliens come to it. It features robots, especially the lugubrious author’s alter-ego, Lovebot, and, getting brainy for a change, quantum phenomena, as when Bob, instead of just chopping a ‘spunky crippled kid’ up with an ax, whacks him with a ‘quantum waveform decollapser’ that renders the annoying child into innumerable, identical, possible spunky crippled kids. Trenchant references are made to highbrow fantasy (Kafka) and SF (Brave New World), but Notley is obviously most inspired by 1950s ‘sci-fi’ flickers and their progeny of giant reptile/bug/thing attack yarns (though the big critter that most excites him is the already-big-enough bear; see the long, wordless story in the center of the book, ‘Pure Action’). And he’s incensed by the Bush administration. Bob is pretty transparently another Notley alter ego—the main one—yet he also seems an ambulatory bud from The Little Shop of Horrors’s Audrey. Energetically drawn, top-drawer madness.”
—Booklist

“How I pity those English monolinguists who will only know Bob the Angry Flower as a hysterically funny force of chaos. Those who read Bob in its original Klingon know it to be a keen, insightful look into the humorous nuances behind today’s headlines.”
—Phil Foglio, co-author of Girl Genius

“Dog Killer is rife with wry political commentary and subversive play, but it’s also an appealing work of dark surrealism…. It’s courageous alternative art. Sounds a lot like what I enjoy about horror fiction….”
—Michael Arnzen, The Goreletter

“Bob. The. Angry. FLOWER. Maybe it’s because I can relate so well that I just laugh my butt off every time I see Bob having one of his hissy fits. And who else describes what we live with now so succinctly—‘Cheney’s tiny Republican heart, tight with hate.’? Bob is me and Bob is you and Bob really should get that fetus of his into dayschool. Before something really bad happens.”
—Donna Barr, author of Desert Peach and Stinz

According to Stephen Notley, he was born Canadian, in Canada. He lived there for years, drew cartoons, and attended schools, among them Fairview High School and the University of Alberta. Continuing to draw cartoons into his early thirties, he avoided useful work for many years until eventually moving to Seattle to begin employment at PopCap Games, which is where he is and what he’s doing now. Somewhere along the way, he published eight collections of his Bob the Angry Flower cartoon strip.

Praise for Stephen Notley

“Intensely funny. I’ve been laughing like a supervillain for days.”
—Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Author/Director of The Avengers